Applying Wireless Sensor Networks to Solve Real-world Problems

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is a mature research field that can be tracked back to the 1980, when the United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) started the Distributed Sensor Network (DSN) program to formally explore the challenges in implementing WSNs. Since then, WSNs progressed into academia and found home in civilian scientific research. Today, WSNs remains an active research topic with over 64,825 publications in IEEEXplore alone. Recent advances in semiconductor and networking technologies are driving the ubiquitous deployment of large-scale WSNs. These technologies enable a new generation of WSNs that differ greatly from networks studied as recently as 5 to 10 years ago. Today's stateof- the-art WSNs hardware platforms have lower costs and are expected to last longer opening the way into their deployment for any application. However, existing WSNs deployments are limited to experimental few hundred nodes networks. This talk explores the current challenges hindering the real-life deployment of large-scale WSN systems. The focus is to map historical WSNs deployment challenges and their severity against today's network and sensor hardware capabilities. Isolating factors that no longer have great effect on the deployment and maintenance costs of WSNs, is expected to instigate a wave of next generation WSNs deployment. To facilitate this aim, the talk will be focusing on WSN-based protocols/algorithms developed to solve current problems facing the deployment of large-scale WSNs. The talk draw on lessons learned from pilot deployments in different application areas including: space exploration, minerals mapping, heat diffusion, border security and flood prediction and control.